Fiction

Foster, by Claire Keegan

• ‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

• Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they are happy – but as soon as I have this thought, I realise its opposite is also true.

Land of Big Numbers, by Te-Ping Chen

• She laughed a lot, and easily. It wasn’t until we actually became friends that I realized she was often very sad. America is like that, I must say, free and easy until you know better.

Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, by Kim Fu

• One adult can be lured into pretend, can taste the tea in our toy cup, hear the voice on the toy phone. One adult could have seen what we saw and carried it quietly within her forever. But not four. Four adults have to agree on what happened, agree on the rules. Four adults can talk to each other until reality straightens, until doubt is crushed, until their memories unstitch and reform. Four adults never see a miracle at once.

Non-Fiction

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber & David Wengrow

• Kandiaronk: I have spent six years reflecting on the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman, and I genuinely think this can only be the case, as long as you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, of all the world’s worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money. In the light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right in refusing to touch, or so much as to look at silver?

• We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

• That indigenous Americans lived in generally free societies, and that Europeans did not, was never really a matter of debate in these exchanges: both sides agreed this was the case.

• If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?

• We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples. Because it was true.

How to Keep House While Drowning, by K.C. Davis

• …the key to juggling is to know that some of the balls you have in the air are made of plastic & some are made of glass.

• No one ever shamed themselves into better mental health.

• If I viewed a day of screen time and not doing any scheduled care tasks as a failure, it would be a lot harder to “get back into routine.” But I didn’t. Trolls and pj’s day was a day when we were being gentle with ourselves, allowing ourselves to take it easy and rest - a day of kindness. Framing it as kindness instead of failure was the key to being able to wake up and choose to get things done the next day.

Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, by Becky Kennedy

• As a parent, I challenge myself to sit with my child in his feeling of distress so he knows he isn’t alone, as opposed to pulling my child out of this moment, which leaves him alone the next time he finds himself there.

• Building resilience is about developing the capacity to tolerate distress, to stay in and with a tough, challenging moment, to find our footing and our goodness even when we don’t have confirmation of achievement or pending success.

• As a result, many parents see behavior as the measure of who our kids are, rather than using behavior as a clue to what our kids might need.

The Invention of Nature: Alexander Humboldt’s New World, by Andrea Wulf

• “Nature is a living whole,’ he later said, not a ‘dead aggregate’. One single life had been poured over stones, plants, animals and humankind. It was this ‘universal profusion with which life is everywhere distributed’ that most impressed Humboldt. Even the atmosphere carried the kernels of future life - pollen, insect eggs and seeds. Life was everywhere and those ‘organic powers are incessantly at work’, he wrote. Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them. Individual phenomena were only important ‘in their relation to the whole’, he explained.”

Notes on Grief, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language.

• For the rest of my life, I will live with my hands outstretched for things that are no longer there.

• Age is irrelevant in grief; at issue is not how old he was but how loved.

Fiction

The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman

• The 1143-year-long war hand begun on false pretenses and only because the two races were unable to communicate. Once they could talk, the first question was ‘Why did you start this thing?’ and the answer was ’Me?

The Mountains Sing, by Nguyen Phan Que Mai

• Human lives were short and fragile. Time and illnesses consumed us, like flames burning away these pieces of wood. But it didn’t matter how long or short we lived. It mattered more how much light we were able to shed on those we loved and how many people we touched with our compassion.

• History will write itself in people’s memories, and as long as those memories live on, we can have faith that we can do better.

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

• It was only when you left it alone that a tree might treat you as a friend. After the blade bit in, you had yourself a war.

What Strange Paradise, by Omar El Akkad * Every man you ever meet in nothing but the product of what was withheld from him, what he feels owed.

• The west you talk about doesn’t exist. It’s a fairytale, a fantasy you sell yourself because the alternative is to admit that you are the least important character in your own story. You invent an entire world because your conscience demands it, you invent good people and bad people and you draw a neat line between them because your simplistic morality demands it. But the two kinds of people in this world are not good and bad, they are engines and fuel. Go ahead, change your country, change your name, change your accent, pull the skin right off your bones, but in their eyes they will always be the engines and you will always, always be fuel.

• Today you are the only boy in the world and tomorrow it will be as though you never existed.

• In their silent reticence was evident the reality that somewhere along the journey they’d passed the point where human goodness gave way to the calculus of survival.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston

• There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

• Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.

• No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.

The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

• Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.

• Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.

• She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one’s major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.

Sula, by Toni Morrison

• In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

• There in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning.

Nemesis Games (The Expanse #5), by James SA Corey

• “Here’s the thing,” Amos said. “If you did go in there, you might feel like you had to do something. And then I might feel like I had to do something. And then we’d all be doing things, and we’d all wind up having a worse day, just in general.”

• “Alien superweapons were used,” Alex said, walking into the room, sleep-sweaty hair standing out from his skull in every direction. “The laws of physics were altered, mistakes were made.”

• Things changed, and they didn’t change back. But sometimes they got better.

• Probably the most common last words that day were going to be Huh, that’s weird. That or Oh shit.

Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel #1), by Connie Willis

• I wanted to come, and if I hadn’t, they would have been all alone, and nobody would have ever known how frightened and brave and irreplaceable they were.

• None of the things one frets about ever happen. Something one’s never thought of does.

The Light Fantastic (Discworld #2), by Terry Pratchett

• The sun rose slowly, as if it wasn’t sure it was worth all the effort.

• The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.

• It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as ‘slightly foxed’, although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well.

• The disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailor who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world.

Us Against You (Beartown #2), by Fredrik Backman

• What does it take to be a good parent? Not much. Just everything. Absolutely everything.

• Everyone is a hundred different things, but in other people’s eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them.

• The complicated thing about good and bad people alike is that most of us can be both at the same time.

• He’s twelve years old, and this summer he learns that people will always choose a simple lie over a complicated truth, because the lie has one unbeatable advantage: the truth always has to stick to what actually happened, whereas the lie just has to be easy to believe.

• It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but then neither does anyone else.

• The best friends of our childhoods are the loves of our lives, and they break our hearts in worse ways.

All Systems Red (Murderbot Diaries #1), by Martha Wells

• I could have become a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

To Say Nothing of the Dog (Oxford Time Travel #2), by Connie Willis

• Cats, as you know, are quite impervious to threats.

• Come here, cat. You wouldn’t want to destroy the space-time continuum, would you? Meow. Meow.

• History was indeed controlled by blind forces, as well as character and courage and treachery and love. And accident and random chance. And stray bullets and telegrams and tips. And cats.

Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch #2), by Ann Leckie

• When they behave properly, you will say there is no problem. When they complain loudly, you will say they cause their own problems with their impropriety. And when they are driven to extremes, you say you will not reward such actions. What will it take for you to listen?

• And it’s so easy to just go along. So easy not to see what’s happening. And the longer you don’t see it, the harder it becomes to see it, because then you have to admit that you ignored it all that time.

• Water will wear away stone, but it won’t cook supper. Everything has its own strengths. Said with enough irony, it could also imply that since the gods surely had a purpose for everyone the person in question must be good for something, but the speaker couldn’t fathom what it might be.

Ancillary Mercy (Imperial Radch #3), by Ann Leckie

• There is always more after the ending. Always the next morning, and the next. Always changes, losses and gains. Always one step after the other. Until the one true ending that none of us can escape. But even that ending is only a small one, larges as it looms for us. There is still the next morning for everyone else. For the vast majority of the rest of the universe that ending might as well not ever have happened. Every ending is an arbitrary one. Everything ending is from another angle, not really an ending.

• There are two parts to reacting aren’t there? How you feel and what you do. And its the thing you do that is the important one.

• You don’t need to know the odds. You need to know how to do the thing you’re trying to do. And then you need to do it.

The Overstory, by Richard Powers

• The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.

• What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

• This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

• People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.

• But people have no idea what time is. They think it’s a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

• Life will cook; the seas will rise. The planet’s lungs will be ripped out. And the law will let this happen, because harm was never imminent enough. Imminent, at the speed of people, is too late. The law must judge imminent at the speed of trees.

• A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel –root and stem–in a great U-turn until it rights itself. But a human child can know it’s pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

• We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.

A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan #1), by Arkady Martine

• So much of who we are is what we remember and retell.

• The problem with sending messages was that people responded to them, which meant one had to write more messages in reply.

• Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist.

• Histories are always worse by the time they get written down.

• Poetry is for the desperate, and for people who have grown old enough to have something to say.

Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse #8), by James SA Corey

• Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.

• There are people I love. There are people who have loved me. I fought for what I believed, protected those I could, and stood my ground against the encroaching darkness. Good enough.

• That’s the thing about autocracy. It looks pretty decent while it still looks pretty decent. Survivable, anyway. And it keeps looking like that right up until it doesn’t. That’s how you find out it’s too late.

• There are only a couple kinds of anger. You get angry because you’re afraid of something or you get angry because you’re frustrated.

Britt-Marie Was Here, by Fredrik Backman

• One morning you wake up with more life behind you than in front of you, not being able to understand how it’s happened.

• A human being, any human being at all, has so perishingly few chances to stay right there, to let go of time and fall into the moment. And to love someone without measure, explode with passion… A few times when we are children, maybe, for those of us who are allowed to be… But after that? How many breaths are we allowed to take beyond the confines of ourselves? How many pure emotions make us cheer out loud without a sense of shame? How many chances do we get to be blessed by amnesia? All passion is childish, it’s banal and naive, it’s nothing we learn, it’s instinctive, and so it overwhelms us… Overturns us… It bears us away in a flood… All other emotions belong to the earth, but passion inhabits the universe. That is the reason why passion is worth something. Not for what it gives us, but for what it demands that we risk - our dignity, the puzzlement of others in their condescending shaking heads…

• You have to understand that when one is just standing there looking, then just for a second one is ready to jump. If one does it, one dares to do it. But if one waits, it’ll never happen.

• You love football because it is instinctive. If a ball comes rolling down the street you give it a punt. You love it for the same reason you fall in love. Because you don’t know how to avoid it.

Leviathan Falls (The Expanse #9), by James SA Corey

• The stars are still there,” she said. “We’ll find our own way back to them.

• “I absolutely believe that people are more good on balance than bad,” he said. “All the wars and all of the cruelty and all of the violence. I’m not looking away from any of that, and I still think there’s something beautiful about being what we are. History is soaked in blood. The future probably will be too. But for every atrocity, there’s a thousand small kindnesses that no one noticed. A hundred people who spent their lives loving and caring for each other. A few moments of real grace.”

• I think about all the things we could have done, all the miracles we could have achieved, if we were all just a little bit better than it turns out we are.

• You’re overthinking this, Cap’n. You got now and you got the second your lights go out. Meantime is the only time there is. All that matters is what we do during it.

• There was so much that they’d never seen or understood. They’d all just bumbled through, using the gates as shortcuts and hoping for the best. A species of beautiful idiots.

Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart

• Sadness made for a better houseguest; at least it was quiet, reliable, consistent.

• Flames are not just the end, they are also the beginning. For everything that you have destroyed can be rebuilt. From your own ashes you can grow again.

• The morning light was the colour of too-milky tea. It snuck into the bedsit like a sly ghost, crossing the carpet and inching slowly up his bare legs.

• She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy (Monk & Robot #2), by Becky Chambers

• You don’t have to have a reason to be tired. You don’t have to earn rest or comfort. You’re allowed to just be.

• How am I supposed to tell people they’re good enough as they are when I don’t think I am?

• The thing about fucking off to the woods is that unless you are a very particular, very rare sort of person, it does not take long to understand why people left said woods in the first place.

• You know how it is; sometimes you just want to have a moment between yourself and a turtle and no one else.

• Well, that’s the nice thing about trees,” Mosscap put its hands on its hips as it looked around. “They’re not going anywhere. You can take all the time you need to get to know them.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman

• Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.

• Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.

• Adults follow paths. Children explore. Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands; perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. I was a child, which meant that I knew a dozen different ways of getting out of our property and into the lane, ways that would not involve walking down our drive.

• Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren’t.

Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel

• My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

• Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.

• It’s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall, but the situation isn’t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day. You wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake up in ignorance and by the evening it’s clear that a pandemic is already here.

• If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.

• “It seems like it’s been fairly well contained,” but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all?

Redshirts, by John Scalzi

• I don’t care whether I really exist or don’t, whether I’m real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate.

• Sooner or later the Narrative will come for each of us.

• “But define ‘completely ridiculous shit,’” Duvall said. “Does space travel count? Contact with alien races? Does quantum physics count? Because I don’t understand that crap at all. As far as I’m concerned, quantum physics could have been written by a hack.

• For all we know, this”-he scrolled up on the phone screen to find a label-“this Wikipedia information database here is compiled by complete idiots.

• Ensign Davis thought, Screw this, I want to live, and swerved to avoid the land worms. But then he tripped and one of the land worms ate his face and he died anyway.

The Vanishing Half, by Britt Bennett

• Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.

• People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.

• A town always looked different once you’d returned, like a house where all the furniture had shifted three inches. You wouldn’t mistake it for a stranger’s house but you’d keeping banging your shins on the table corners.

• The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.

An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon

• Poor, poor books. Lonely pages bound in lonely leather, their only company the occasional louse. They exist only to be read, and yet with no one there to read them, they might as well not have been bornt at all. I run my fingers along the spines of the books I can reach. I do it to affirm them. To let them know I’m a lover of stories even stories about alchematics or biology and other true things.

Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley

• We love imperfect people. We can love them and not condone their actions and beliefs.

• Inaction is a powerful choice.

• When someone dies, everything about them becomes past tense. Except for the grief. Grief stays in the present. It’s even worse when you’re angry at the person. Not just for dying. But for how.

• Wisdom is not bestowed. In its raw state, it is the heartbreak of knowing things you wish you didn’t.

• Some boats are made for the river and some for the ocean. And there are some who can go anywhere because they always know the way home.

This Is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone

• Books are letters in bottles, cast into the waves of time, from one person trying to save the world to another.

• There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never-and I have to write the rest of this not knowing.

• I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.

• Sometimes when you write, you say things I stopped myself from saying.

The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by VE Schwab

• What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?

• The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.

The Winners (Beartown #3), by Fredrik Backman

• He has seen good people capable of great evil, but also evil people capable of incredible light. It’s the same everywhere. Almost everybody loves too much, hates too easily, forgives too little. But most people want the same things: to live in peace, to make their hearts beat a little slower when the night comes, to earn some money to support the ones they love.

• We fool ourselves that we can protect the people we love, because if we accepted the truth we’d never let them out of our sight.

• He’s the sort of person who runs toward a fire. No hesitation, no questions, he just runs. People like that are rare, but you know who they are when you see them.

• Our children never warn us that they’re thinking of growing up, one day they’re just too big to want to hold our hand, it’s just as well we never know when the last time is going to be or we’d never let

• When you’re young you believe that love is infatuation, but infatuation is simple, any child can become infatuated, fall in love. But real love? Love is a job for an adult. Love demands a whole person, all the best of you, all the worst. It has nothing to do with romance, because the hard part of a marriage isn’t that I have to live seeing all your faults, but that you have to live with me seeing them. That I know everything about you now. Most people aren’t brave enough to live without secrets. Everyone dreams about being invisible sometimes, no one dreams of being transparent.

My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologizes, by Fredrik Backman

• People in the real world always say, when something terrible happens, that the sadness and loss and aching pain of the heart will “lessen as time passes,” but it isn’t true. Sorrow and loss are constant, but if we all had to go through our whole lives carrying them the whole time, we wouldn’t be able to stand it. The sadness would paralyze us. So in the end we just pack it into bags and find somewhere to leave it.

• Death’s greatest power is not that it can make people die, but that it can make people want to stop living.

• Because not all monsters were monsters in the beginning. Some are monsters born of sorrow.

• Having a grandmother is like having an army. This is a grandchild’s ultimate privilege: knowing that someone is on your side, always, whatever the details.

• One day at a time. One dream at a time. And one could say it’s right and one could say it’s wrong. And probably both would be right. Because life is both complicated and simple. Which is why there are cookies.

• Everything is complicated if no one explains it to you.

• People who have never been hunted always seem to think there’s a reason for it. ‘They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.’ As if that was how oppression works.

Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

• As they carried along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?

• It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.

• The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life.

• It was easy to understand why women feared men with their physical strength and lust and social powers, but women, with their canny intuitions, were so much deeper: they could predict what was to come long before it came, dream it overnight, and read your mind.

• But it cut him, all the same, to see one of his own so upset by the sight of what other children craved and he could not help but wonder if she’d be brave enough or able for what the world had in store.

Non-Fiction

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake

• The difference between animals and fungi is simple: Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.

• A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today. Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed, “We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.

• Fungi make worlds. They also unmake them. There are lots of ways to catch them in the act. When you cook mushroom soup, or just eat it. When you go out gathering mushrooms, or buy them. When you ferment alcohol, plant a plant, or just bury your hands in the soil; and whether you let a fungus into your mind, or marvel at the way that it might enter the mind of another. Whether you’re cured by a fungus, or watch it cure someone else; whether you build your home from fungi, or start growing mushrooms in your home, fungi will catch you in the act. If you’re alive, they already have.

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

• Access to a dark night sky-to see and be inspired by the universe as it really is-should be a human right, not a luxury for the chosen few.

• Science is supposedly about asking questions, except about scientists and how science is done.

• Much more interesting is the question of how we get free. What does freedom look like? When I put this question to artist Shanequa Gay, she told me, “Freedom looks like choice-making without having to consider so many others when I make those choices.” I hear in Shanequa’s response a deep cry for space to self-actualize, to not always be stuck in survival mode.

• Part of science, therefore, involves writing a dominant group’s social politics into the building blocks of a universe that exists far beyond and with little reference to our small planet and the apes that are responsible for melting its polar ice caps.

Things My Son Needs to Know About the World, by Fredrik Backman

• I just want you to know that I love you. Once you’re older, you’ll realize that I made an endless line of mistakes during your childhood. I know that. I’ve resigned myself to it. But I just want you to know that I did my very, very best. I left it all on the field. I gave this every ounce of everything I had.

• The realization that you will, from that moment on, draw all your breaths through someone else’s lungs hits you harder when you aren’t prepared.

• Words matter. Be better.

• I want you to always remember that you can become whatever you want to become, but that’s nowhere near as important as knowing that you can be exactly who you are.

• This parenthood thing didn’t come with instructions, that’s all I’m saying. You spit on the napkin. Then you wipe the child’s face with the napkin. You don’t spit straight onto the child. My bad.

• We want you to be better than us. Because if our kids don’t grow up to be better than us, then what’s the point of all this? We want you to be kinder, smarter, more humble, more generous, and more selfless than we are. We want to give you the very best circumstances we can possibly provide. So we follow sleeping methods and go to seminars and buy ergonomic bathtubs and push car-seat salesmen up against the wall and shout, ‘The safest! I want THE SAFEST, doyouhearme?!’ (Not that I’ve ever done that, of course; you shouldn’t pay so much attention to what your mother says.)

Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, by James Rebanks

• The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in a little life on the land. In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly might be a virtue.

• There is something about planting trees that feels good. If you have done it well, it will outlast you and leave the world a little richer and more beautiful because of your efforts. Planting a tree means you believe in, and care about, a world that will be there after you are gone. It means you have thought about more than yourself, and that you can imagine a future beyond your own lifespan, and you care about that future.

• These people lived insular, often deeply private lives focused on their work. Their voices were rarely heard, because they sought no audience. Their identities were constructed from things that couldn’t be bought in shops. They wore old clothes and only went shopping occasionally for essentials. They held “shop-bought” things in great contempt. They preferred cash to credit, and would mend anything that broke, piling up old things to use again someday, rather than throwing them away. They had hobbies and interests that cost nothing, turning their necessary tasks, like catching rats or foxes, into sport. Their friendships were built around their work, and the breeds of cattle and sheep they kept. They rarely took holidays or bought new cars. And it wasn’t all work-a lot of time was spent on farm-related activities that were communal and more relaxed, or in the simple enjoyment of wild things. My grandfather called this way of life “living quietly.”

• Thankfully, my father never sent me to agricultural college. He was old-school and thought those places turned out people who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

• There were profoundly important questions about the potential effects of each new technology that it was nobody’s job to ask or answer. There was no mechanism for farmers or ecologists to judge whether a technology or new farming practice was on balance a “good” thing or a “bad” thing, and we really didn’t know when we had crossed the invisible threshold from one to the other.

Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin

• I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.

• I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.

• You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.

• It was better not to judge the man who had gone down under an impossible burden. It was better to remember: Thou knowest this man’s fall, but thou knowest not his wrassling.

The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward

• You can’t tiptoe toward justice. You can’t walk up to the door all polite and knock once or twice, hoping someone’s home. Justice is a door that, when closed, must be kicked in. (Daniel Jose Older)

• I want to look happily forward. I want to be optimistic. I want to have a dream. I want to live in jubilee. I want my daughters to feel that they have the power to at least try to change things, even in a world that resists change with more strength than they have. I want to tell them they can overcome everything, if the are courageous, resilient and brave. Paradoxically, I also want to tell them their crowns have already been bought and paid for and that all they have to do is put them on their heads. But the world keeps tripping me up. My certainty keeps flailing. (Edwidge Danticat)

• Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black. (Jesmyn Ward)

Richard Wagemese Selected: What Comes from Spirit, by Richard Wagamese

• So I explained to him what the Old One had told me. The process of braiding hair is like a prayer, he said. Each of the three strands in a single braid represents many things. In one instance they might represent faith, honesty and kindness. In another they might be mind, body and spirit, or love, respect and tolerance. The important thing, he explained, was that each strand be taken as representative of one essential human quality. As the men, or the women, braided their hair they concentrated or meditated on those three qualities. Once the braid was completed the process was repeated on the other side. Then as they walked through their day they had visible daily reminders of the human qualities they needed to carry through life with them. The Old One said they had at least about twenty minutes out of their day when they focused themselves entirely on spiritual principles. In this way, the people they came in contact with were the direct beneficiaries of that inward process. So braids, he said, reflected the true nature of Aboriginal people. They reflected a people who were humble enough to ask the Creator for help and guidance on a daily basis. They reflected truly human qualities within the people themselves: ideals they sought to live by. And they reflected a deep and abiding concern for the planet, for life, their people and themselves. Each time you braid your hair, he told me, you become another in a long line of spiritually based people and your prayer joins the countless others that have been offered up to the Creator since time began. You become a part of a rich and vibrant tradition. As the young boy listened I could see the same things going on in his face that must have gone on in my own. Suddenly, a braid became so much more than a hairstyle or a cultural signature. It became a connection to something internal as well as external - a signpost to identity, tradition and self-esteem. The words Indian, Native and Aboriginal took on new meaning and new impact.”

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, by Elizabeth Kolbert * I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.

• Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.

• If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.

Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life, by Lulu Miller

• The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the “convenient” lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.

• I have come to believe that it is our life’s work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life’s work work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every ruler there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.

• It was the dandelion principle! To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine-a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.

• Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.

• This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.” The work of good science is to try and peer beyond the “convenient” lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.

Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy, by Heather Ann Thompson

• So obvious was the racial discrimination at Attica that white prisoners readily agreed that guards applied rules differently to blacks and Puerto Ricans.

• I think Attica brings to mind several things. The first is the basic inhumanity of man to man, the veneer of civilization as we sit here today in a well-lit, reasonably well appointed room with suits and ties on objectively performing an autopsy on this day, yet cannot get at the absolute horror of the situation, to people, be they black, yellow, orange, spotted, whatever, whatever uniform they wore, that day tore from them the shreds of their humanity. The veneer was penetrated. After seeing that day I went home and sat down and spoke with my wife and I said for the first time being a somewhat dedicated amateur army type, I could understand what may have happened at My Lai.

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, by Suzanne Simard

• This Mother Tree was the central hub that the saplings and seedlings nested around, with threads of different fungal species, of different colors and weights, linking them, layer upon layer, in a strong, complex web

• Such a marvel, the tenacity of the buds to surge with life every spring, to greet the lengthening days and warming weather with exuberance, no matter what hardships were brought by winter.

• Plants are attuned to one another’s strengths and weaknesses, elegantly giving and taking to attain exquisite balance. There is grace in complexity, in actions cohering, in sum totals.

• I don’t presume to grasp Aboriginal knowledge fully. It comes from a way of knowing the earth-an epistemology-different from that of my own culture. It speaks of being attuned to the blooming of the bitterroot, the running of the salmon, the cycles of the moon. Of knowing that we are tied to the land-the trees and animals and soil and water-and to one another, and that we have a responsibility to care for these connections and resources, ensuring the sustainability of these ecosystems for future generations and to honor those who came before. Of treading lightly, taking only what gifts we need, and giving back. Of showing humility toward and tolerance for all we are connected to in this circle of life. But what my years in the forestry profession have also shown me is that too many decision-makers dismiss this way of viewing nature and rely only on select parts of science. The impact has become too devastating to ignore. We can compare the condition of the land where it has been torn apart, each resource treated in isolation from the rest, to where it has been cared for according to the Secwepemc principal of kÌ“wseltktnews (translated as “we are all related”) or the Salish concept of nə́cÌ“aÊ”mat ct (“we are one”). We must heed the answers we’re being given.

The Anthropocene Reviewed, by John Green

• ‘In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.

• We can talk and talk and talk about what the pain is like, but we can never manage to convey what it is.

• We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.

• One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.

• To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human or otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry and watch the sycamore trees leaf out in June. When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling. I want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.

• You can’t see the future coming–not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.

• I’ll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now. So we raise a glass to them–and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.

• When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes - often, in fact - you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.”

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott

• Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

• For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

• Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

All the White Friends I Couldn’t Keep: Hope - And Hard Pills to Swallow - About Fighting for Black Lives, by Andre Henry

• This might explain why white people are so defensive about their space. They’ll insist at their dinner tables are not political. And while it may be true that they do no intentional political consciousness-raising at Sunday lunch, they nevertheless uphold and protect the dominant and pervasive anti-Black common sense of the wider society while they eat. Then they reinterpret our Black-experiences–which undermine the myths they crave–as “politics,” a euphemism for impolite conversation. They gaslight us and call it keeping the peace.

** To Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, by Michael Schur**

• What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Is there something we could do that’s better? Why is it better?

• True happiness comes from remaining focused on the things we do, and doing them with no purpose other than to do them.

• This habituation, the practice of working at our virtues, is really the whole shebang here.

People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present, by Dara Horn

• The line most often quoted from Frank’s diary are her famous words, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” These words are “inspiring,” by which we mean that they flatter us. They make us feel forgiven for those lapses of our civilization that allow for piles of murdered girls-and if those words came from a murdered girl, well, then, we must be absolved, because they must be true. That gift of grace and absolution from a murdered Jew (exactly the gift that lies at the heart of Christianity) is what millions of people are so eager to find in Frank’s hiding place, in her writings, in her “legacy.” It is far more gratifying to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognize the obvious: Frank wrote about people being “truly good at heart” before meeting people who weren’t. Three weeks after writing those words, she met people who weren’t.

• The freedoms that we cherish are meaningless without our commitments to one another: to civil discourse, to actively educating the next generation, to welcoming strangers, to loving our neighbors. The beginning of freedom is the beginning of responsibility. Our night of vigil has already begun.

• Since ancient times, in every place they have ever lived, Jews have represented the frightening prospect of freedom. As long as Jews existed in any society, there was evidence that it in fact wasn’t necessary to believe what everyone else believed, that those who disagreed with their neighbors could survive and even flourish against all odds. The Jews’ continued distinctiveness, despite overwhelming pressure to become like everyone else, demonstrated their enormous effort to cultivate that freedom: devotion to law and story, deep literacy, and an absolute obsessiveness about consciously transmitting those values between generations. The existence of Jews in any society is a reminder that freedom is possible, but only with responsibility-and that freedom without responsibility is no freedom at all.

• The insane conspiracy theories that motivate people who commit antisemitic violence reflect a fear of real freedom: a fondness for tyrants, an aversion to ideas unlike their own, and most of all, a casting-off of responsibility for complicated problems. None of this is a coincidence.

• These stories, I came to understand, were presenting a challenge to the Western idea of the purpose of creativity. Stories with definitive endings don’t necessarily reflect a belief that the world makes sense, but they do reflect a belief in the power of art to make sense of it. What one finds in Jewish storytelling, though, is something really different: a kind of realism that comes from humility, from the knowledge that one cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world.

The Explosive Child: A New Approach for Understanding and Parenting Easily Frustrated, Chronically Inflexible Children, by Ross W. Greene

• When your child has the skills to respond adaptively to demands and expectations, he does. If your child had the skills to handle disagreements and changes in plan and adults setting limits and demands being placed on him without falling apart, he’d be handling these challenges adaptively. Because he doesn’t have those skills, he isn’t. But let there be no doubt: he’d prefer to be handling those challenges adaptively because doing well is preferable. And because-and this is, without question, the most important theme of this entire book- kids do well if they can.

• We all want our own way; some of us have the skills to get our own way adaptively, and some of us don’t.

• Behaviorally challenging kids are challenging because they’re lacking the skills to not be challenging.

• An explosive outburst-like other forms of maladaptive behavior-occurs when the cognitive demands being placed upon a person outstrip that person’s capacity to respond adaptively.

• Diagnoses -such as ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, bipolar disorder, depression, an autism spectrum disorder, reactive attachment disorder, the newly coined disruptive mood regulation disorder, or any other disorder-can be helpful in some ways. They “validate” that there’s something different about your kid, for example. But they can also be counterproductive in that they can cause caregivers to focus more on a child’s challenging behaviors rather than on the lagging skills and unsolved problems giving rise to those behaviors. Also, diagnoses suggest that the problem resides within the child and that it’s the child who needs to be fixed. The reality is that it takes two to tango. Let there be no doubt, there’s something different about your child. But you are part of the mix as well. How you understand and respond to the hand you’ve been dealt is essential to helping your child.

• Your energy can be devoted far more productively to collaborating with your child on solutions to the problems that are causing challenging episodes than in sticking with strategies that may actually have made things worse and haven’t led to durable improvement.

• The reason reward and punishment strategies haven’t helped is because they won’t teach your child the skills he’s lacking or solve the problems that are contributing to challenging episodes.

Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool, by Emily Oster

• First, recognize that children are not adults, and you usually cannot improve their behavior with a discussion. If your four-year-old is taking their shirt off in the museum, they will not respond to a reasoned discussion about how you actually do need to wear a shirt in public places. The flip side of this - more important - is that you shouldn’t expect them to respond to adult reasoning. And as a result, you should not get angry the way you would if, say, your spouse was stripping in the museum and didn’t stop after you explained why they shouldn’t. Toddler discipline is, really, parental discipline. Breathe. Take a second.

• If you want to collect data and make pretty graphs, go for it. But remember that this is the illusion of control, not actual control.

• So, yes, it makes sense to take parenting seriously, and to want to make the best choices for your kid and the best choices for you. But there will be many times that you need to just trust that if you’re doing your best, that’s all you can do. Being present and happy with your kids is more important than, say, worrying about bees. At the end, let’s raise a glass to using data where it’s useful, to making the right decisions for our families, to doing our best, and-sometimes-to just trying not to think about it.

When We Cease to Understand the World, by Benjamin Labatut

• We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.

• Looking at the waves scudding outwards and getting lost on the horizon, he could not help but recall the words of his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.

• Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised.

Known My Name, by Chanel Miller

• I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm. Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings. The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone else’s. I did it, I am here. Looking back, all the ones who doubted or hurt or nearly conquered me faded away, and I am the only one standing. So now, the time has come. I dust myself off, and go on.

• My pain was never more valuable than his potential.

• Most of us understand that your future is not promised to you. It is constructed day by day, through the choices you make. Your future is earned, little by little, through hard work and action. If you don’t act accordingly, that dream dissolves.

• I used to shrink at harsh tones, used to be afraid. Until I learned it takes nothing to be hostile. Nothing. It is easy to be the one yelling, chucking words that burn like coals, neon red, meant to harm. I have learned I am water. The coals sizzle, extinguishing when they reach me. I see how, those fiery coals are just black stones, sinking to the bottom.

The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, by Meghan O’Rourke

• I know many people who are suspicious of diagnoses-they think of them as labels that reduce or stigmatize. I knew, already, that a diagnosis was not going to answer all my questions. But I craved a diagnosis because it is a form of understanding.

• And so it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young woman in possession of vague symptoms like fatigue and pain will be in search of a doctor who believes she is actually sick.

• But the fatigue of physical dysfunction, I came to recognize, is as different from normal sleep deprivation as COVID-19 is from the common cold. It was not caused by needing sleep, I thought, but by my body’s cellular conviction that it needed to conserve energy in order to fix whatever was wrong. The feeling erased my will, the sense of identity that drives most of us. The worst part of my fatigue was the loss of an intact sense of self.

• There is a razor-thin line between trying to find something usefully redemptive in illness and lying to ourselves about the nature of suffering. Until we mourn what is lost in illness-and until we have a medical community that takes seriously the suffering of patients-we should not celebrate what is gained in it.

• There is a razor-thin line between trying to find something usefully redemptive in illness and lying to ourselves about the nature of suffering. Until we mourn what is lost in illness-and until we have a medical community that takes seriously the suffering of patients-we should not celebrate what is gained in it.

Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

• Mosses are so little known by the general public that only a few have been given common names. Most are known solely by their scientific Latin names, a fact which discourages most people from attempting to identify them. But I like the scientific names, because they are as beautiful and intricate as the plants they name. Indulge yourself in the words, rhythmic and musical, rolling off your tongue: Dolicathecia striatella, Thuidium delicatulum, Barbula fallax.

• There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents. This is what has been called the “dialect of moss on stone” - an interface of immensity and minute ness, of past and present, softness and hardness, stillness and vibrancy, yin and yan.

• Just as you can pick out the voice of a loved one in the tumult of a noisy room, or spot your child’s smile in a sea of faces, intimate connection allows recognition in an all-too-often anonymous world. This sense of connection arises from a special kind of discrimination, a search image that comes from a long time spent looking and listening. Intimacy gives us a different way of seeing, when visual acuity is not enough.

• In indigenous ways of knowing, it is understood that each living being has a particular role to play. Every being is endowed with certain gifts, its own intelligence, its own spirit, its own story. Our stories tell us that the Creator gave these to us, as original instructions. The foundation of education is to discover that gift within us and learn to use it well.

• I am trying to understand what it means to own a thing, especially a wild and living being. To have exclusive rights to its fate? To dispose of it at will? To deny others it’s use? Ownership seems a uniquely human behavior, a social contract validating the desire for purposeless possession and control.

Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, by Ben Goldfarb

• Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year. If that all sounds hyperbolic to you, well, I’m going to spend this book trying to change your mind.

• Yet beavers are as balletic in water as they are clumsy out of it. They can hold their breath for up to fifteen minutes, and their underwater gymnastics are powered by webbed hind feet. Transparent eyelids allow them to see below the surface, while a second set of fur-lined lips close behind their teeth, permitting them to chew and drag wood without drowning. Building dams expands the extent of beavers’ watery domains, submerges lodge entrances to repel predators, and gives them a place to stash their food caches. Ponds also serve to irrigate water-loving trees like willow, allowing beavers to operate as rotational farmers: They’ll chew down vegetation in one corner of their compound while cultivating their next crop in another.

• Add up all those dependents, and you begin to comprehend why scientists consider beavers the ultimate keystone species. To architects, a keystone is the wedge-shaped block that forms the apex of a stone arch, the brick that holds the span in place. To ecologists, a keystone species is that rare organism that likewise supports an entire biological community. Salmon, whose decomposing carcasses sustain grizzly bears, eagles, and even trees, are one keystone species; elephants, who clear the savanna for grasses by uprooting trees and shrubs, are another. Pull the keystone out, and the arch-or the ecosystem-collapses.

H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

• There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

• We carry the lives we’ve imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost.

• Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob’. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.

• The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world.

• Some things happen only once, twice in a lifetime. The world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them.

• What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later. Even as I watched I’d half-realised Prideaux was a figure I’d picked out for a father. But what I should have realised, too, on those northern roads, is that what the mind does after losing one’s father isn’t just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with.

Laughing with the Trickster, by Tomson Highway

• As for all the languages the whole world over, they are so different one from the other that the result, if they were spoken all at once, would be a cacophony, a dreadful clattering of wayward consonants. Still, all are here for a reason. Each has its genius, its strength, its applicability. Most pointedly, if botanists tell us that the Amazon jungle has plants and herbs that number in the millions, each of which holds the key to a possible cure for physical ailments, illness, and disease, then languages function likewise. The difference is that the ailments they address are not so much physical as emotional, psychological, and spiritual, ailments that can be just as debilitating, just as lethal.